[Religion and Revolution]: Mod Development

[Schmiddie]

WOW, really fantastic!!!!!

 

[raystuttgart]

Yes, indeed, the screens look awesome !

I will start implementation the next days.
(Will take a while though, since I am really busy in real life.)

@Willi:
Thanks a lot for your efforts.

@Schmiddie:
I may already have the buttons for the feature.
Otherwise I will write you a private message.

 

[Nightinggale]

I committed a bugfix to SVN. Building related caches didn't update when adding free buildings, only when adding real ones. I looked around and the only ingame bug I could find due to this issue is when gaining John Harvard the colonies without schools fail increase teach level. It didn't seem to affect colonies built after you gained him, only the colonies without schools at the turn where he joined. Also the problem would go away by building a new building in affected colonies or by saving and then loading.

Still no closer to find cause of the desync though, but at least the search resulted in one bugfix.

"Winter" Screen (full moon)

Are you saying that you used summer/winter as day/night?

 

[Willi_Tell]

Glad you guys like the africa screen!
Looking forward for release 1.8 now

Are you saying that you used summer/winter as day/night?

yes
I didn't change any code though, so there is not a "real" day/night interval. The night screen is just a replacement for the winter screen and displayed randomly in the same way...

 

[Nightinggale]

Glad you guys like the africa screen!
Looking forward for release 1.8 now

Me too. It just bugs me that I'm still no closer to finding the cause of the desyncs
It would be good if MP is stable in the next release.

I didn't change any code though, so there is not a "real" day/night interval. The night screen is just a replacement for the winter screen and displayed randomly in the same way...

When you set sail from America to Africa it is random what time of the day you arrive, which mean your approach appears to be well suited. I think the winter screen is selected during certain months, which mean it appears random if you don't pay attention to the date. The number of months/weeks in a turn is not the same through the entire game meaning turns between winter screens aren't constant either.

 

[Nightinggale]

I committed a change to the teacher list. It should no longer cause desyncs when training a unit ordered though the list. This shouldn't affect singleplayer at all.

 

[raystuttgart]

Ok.

 

[Hrvoje193]

There were lot of talks about pirates, but i don't know if anyone suggested Pirates as minor civilization.Basic idea is:
Cities on small islands
Can hire to harass other EU nations - Only by attacking with ships or maybe even on ground?
Can hire to transport goods.
Sometimes they could offer ships at better price.
Consume lots of any type of alcohol without significant price drop.

What do you think?

 

[raystuttgart]

What do you think?

Sounds like a lot of effort.
But if you want to implement that as a modmod, go ahead.

 

[Hrvoje193]

Sounds like a lot of effort.
But if you want to implement that as a modmod, go ahead.

Unfortunately I am no modder.

 

[Daw]

i don't know if anyone suggested Pirates

I did, but privately, not in a thread. Maybe someone else did, I don't know. That, however was not my major concern, so I dropped the subject fast.

Sounds like a lot of effort.

Yes it does. After all I am still trying to make my way through the XMLs for those changes I wanted...

However, although I have 2 left hands in modding, I assume a lot of what Hrvoje193 talks about has actually been already done: you have added lots of new Native tribes (one of them could be named Pirates as well), so adding another faction should be more like copy/paste. It still requires effort though to adjust consumption priorities from guns/horses/tools to guns/alcohol/luxuries. But that does not look like too much if you know exactly what and where to change.

As for the other Pirate features, I see them executable the following way:

Can hire to harass other EU nations - Only by attacking with ships or maybe even on ground?

Not sure I got it right about hire who to harass Europeans... However, harassing Europeans is indeed essential for Pirates, and they definitely need fleet for that.

Currently, we have Privateers and Pirate Frigates. And we have an ability to "get free" for Criminals, Servants and Slaves.

Now I think that it is quite possible to enable the "freeing" ability to Privateers and Pirate Frigates, and have all who "get free" join the Pirates faction instead of joining wild fauna as they do now. Thus the Pirates faction will have land units (to put them to work or arm them and build an army) and naval units.

It still is an effort, but perhaps a less effort than to code everything anew.

Can hire to transport goods.

Not sure again here hiring who it is about. But with the Privateers and Frigates fleeing free, and the ability to capture ships (that is already there), the Pirates faction will be able to easily transport whatever they need to be transported.

Sometimes they could offer ships at better price.

Now that seems to be a real effort, because (if my idea of what I am talking about is not entirely wrong) it calls for a new behavior pattern that has to be thought through, then coded, then tested, then debugged, then tested again... and so on. So I would just drop that point.

Although it actually is not so different from King offering troops or slaves, or the Church offering Conquistadors. So it could be pretty much about copy/paste (I actually have no idea of how those dll-diplo-events are done).

Yet the whole idea does requires graphics for the leaderhead, and that may be an issue...

 

[raystuttgart]

@Daw and Hrvoje:

Guys, please understand that I am not planning to implement any further features after Release 1.8 (which will contain Africa Screen).

Except Schmiddie and myself, there are no other team members still active in this project.

So any further development will probably take place in modmods - if at all.
Those will be new projects and have their own threads.
(Maybe even their own subforum if they grow big enough.)

If you want to continue discussing your ideas, I would really appreciate, if you would create your own threads in Civ4Col - Creation & Customization
instead of using the development thread of the main mod.
(These discussions are simply not related to our development at all and wild guessing about possible technical implementations really does not help us.)

 

[Nightinggale]

Except Schmiddie and myself, there are no other team members still active in this project.

However I have reduced myself to bugfixing and haven't made new features in a while. I have considered adding more "build route to" options to have one button for each type of road (road, plastered road and railroad). Currently it will build railroads only, which is a bit overkill if you don't plan to use trains at that location. Also you may want to build a road and then build a railroad once the road is finished. I just haven't come around to figure out how to implement something like this yet. I'm not even sure I will even do it.

 

[raystuttgart]

I have started working on "Africa Screen" yesterday night.

I am using code from KJ's "Slavery Market. The Orient. Port-Royal", which used Dom Pedro's "Triangle Trade".
(Actually the code I am using is the part from Dom Pedro.)

This definitely speeds up my implementation.
But the feature is still quite big and complex and will thus require some time.

 

[raystuttgart]

@Schmiddie:

I have uploaded Art for Africa Screen.
(Background graphics from Willi and 2 Buttons.)

Maybe you could take a look at the buttons I have uploaded and see if they are ok.
("Sail To Africa"-Button and the other one is at the top of the Main Screen to access Africa Sceen.)

@Willi:

The background graphics for Africa Screen are 4times as big as the background graphics of Europe Screen.
It is not a problem, I was just wondering if that is necessary.

 

[Schmiddie]

maybe I can scale down the size of the graphic?

 

[raystuttgart]

It is not really a problem.
I was just wondering.

Still working on merging DLL.
It really is a lot of code to integrate and adapt (and improve).
And I can only spend a few hours each evening / night.

 

[Schmiddie]

I think the buttons are ok.

But I will have a further look as soon as they are implemented in the game.

 

[Willi_Tell]

The background graphics for Africa Screen are 4times as big as the background graphics of Europe Screen.
It is not a problem, I was just wondering if that is necessary.

maybe I can scale down the size of the graphic?

I just compressed the dds with GIMP (BC3/DXT5). If you have the tools to make it "smaller" without losing any quality then go for it...

But I would not suggest to scale down the size (amount of pixel) of the graphic. Like Ray said: The size isn't that big, that the game would have any problem with it.

 

[Nightinggale]

But I would not suggest to scale down the size (amount of pixel) of the graphic.

I fully agree with that. It's dangerous to remove pixels just because you can't tell the difference as it will likely end up hurting whoever has high resolution monitors.

The only thing I can think of as bad regarding adding a big image is the already slow startup time. However I tried packing Art in 1.6 and that really made a difference. Why is it that the releases aren't packed? I understand the individual files on svn, but not really in releases considering the difference it makes to pack them.